new categories of collective being
A few hours ago, I had some sense of topics I'd like to write on, but the hours bleed into each other and erode my energy and sense of direction. I know one of the topics I wanted to comment on was the capitalist/technofeudalist politicoeconomic system we live under. The cognitive dissonace people have around this topic is astounding. At my work, we litigate elder abuse cases. The attorneys have this awareness that the corporate owners of the nursing homes we go after are profit-motivated, and that this leads them to make choices that put profit above people, but they can't or don't extend that thinking to the way the rest of society works, including firms like ours. That the functioning of our company plays a vital role in contributing to the continuance of the abuse we purport to defend people from is not something anyone would like to think about.
When everything is governed by a mentality that prizes profit above all else, the result is total dehumanization. If you look at how all of the powerful institutions of society work, profit governs all. The politicians whose campaigns receive the most money are almost always the ones who get into office. Bankrolled by super PACs, those politicians essentially have no choice but to become a mouthpiece for the interests of the wealthy people who bought them into office.
We have never lived in anything even remotely resembling a democracy. We have no direct control or ability to vote over what our taxes fund. Our taxes fund the mass murder of innocent people across the global, especially in the Global South. The politicians who are owned by the extreme wealth that funded their campaigns do not represent their constituents; they represent the interests of said extreme wealth. The mainstream media is all controlled by a very small handful of people who engineer the illusion of choice by hemorrhaging subsidiaries to disguise the fact that it is, after all, just a handful of insanely wealthy people controlling all mainstream news.
It should come as no surprise that people, especially young people, have rejected what is being offered in terms of opportunities for political engagement. There is this foggy sense that nothing will ever change, that nothing we are able to do adds up to anything meaningful, and this dissuades us from attempting to participate, which of course further strengthens the status quo.
Politically awakening to the reality we live in is jarring and enormously overwhelming; the problem, systemic, is so much bigger than an individual's capacity to act. But the stage of awakening we are currently and collectively experiencing is crucial to fomenting change. The unbearable quality of all that we are forced to witness and participate in, ever more excruciating the more we come to understand it, is the catalyst that will alchemically transform the pathways available to us. When a transformation occurs within ourselves, the consequent changes that we consciously and unconsciously mirror and project onto the material world will eventually crescendo to the point that they can no longer be contained by the rigid definitions and tyrannical logic of the status quo.
Collectively, we have the ability to manifest into material being categories of possibility that cannot even be conjured into thought yet, as the substrate enabling these particular chemical reactions to occur has not been produced yet. And like a chemical reaction, there will come a point where radical change is not only possible, but entirely inevitable. What type of change that might be will depend largely on the intentions with which we pursue the engineering of new categories of collective being.